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Thursday, October 25, 2012

Celebrating Year One: Snapshots

What a great first anniversary we had! I wanted to update you sooner, but I spent most of Tuesday on a roadtrip to Indiana for work and came home too tired to blog. So, I'm playing catch up now and wanted to share some snapshots of our celebration...

Beautiful flowers that Alex sent to me at work. He had them create an arrangement that looked like my wedding bouquet. You did good, Mr. C.!

Paper gifts are the tradition for first anniversaries. I made Alex a photo book of all of our "firsts" together and our gift to each other was tickets to the Fun. concert in Chicago next month. I also gave Alex the "to my groom on our wedding day" card that I meant to give him on our wedding day. It got lost in a bag of wedding items during that crazy weekend so I figured it was better one year late than never. :)

The highlight of our day was definitely our dinner at Girl & the Goat. If you aren't familiar with the restaurant, Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard is the executive chef and she's basically a food superstar here in Chicago. It's one of the hardest reservations in the city to score and I have been trying for two years now. So, when I was looking in early August and found one at a normal time on our anniversary date I figured it must be meant to be! The odds were against us with a business trip scheduled for the crack of dawn the next morning and the virus that wiped me out for a full week leading up to our anniversary, but I made it... I wasn't going to give up this reservation after waiting so long!
Dinner didn't disappoint either. The restaurant is actually really laidback for as hyped up as the place is and the service is great. The food was obviously the highlight though. I enjoyed it so much I didn't even photograph it! The plates at Girl & the Goat are meant to be shared, which is good since I had a difficult time paring down exactly what to order. Our server encouraged us to order 4-6 items and they'd bring them out as they were ready-- tapas-style. We started with their freshly baked focaccia (or "fallcoccia," as they called it) with mushroom butter and tomato jam. And then we shared chickpea and goat cheese fritters with tomatillo sauce, amazing grilled broccoli with blue cheese sauce and homemade spiced rice krispies (random, but probably my favorite thing that we ordered), seared scallops with Brussels sprouts, pomegranate seeds, pepitas, and pecans in a pumpkin sauce, and then we also tried goat (her signature ingredient, of course)-- a confit goat belly with lobster, crab, and fennel. It was an amazing meal and it definitely exceeded my already high expectations!

And while they did have a pumpkin pie gelato on the dessert menu (my two weaknesses in one dessert!) I restrained myself so that we could go home and eat year-old frozen wedding cake. I have to admit, it held up better than I had anticipated.

Cheers to our first anniversary! Here's to many more years of A Squared!

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A Squared is all about life, love, and the pursuit of great food here in the fabulous city of Chicago. I love food: both cooking (it's my therapy) and trying new restaurants. You can also find me exploring Chicago, traveling, drinking wine, studying architecture, and spending time with my husband, friends & family. And I will share it all with you here.
Welcome to A Squared!